Enterprises often employ large, complex, computing environments that include a number of enterprise components such as servers, routers, databases, repositories, mainframes, personal computers, business applications and enterprise management software, for example. Such enterprises may have a desire to track, evaluate and manage applications and software modules deployed throughout the enterprise.
Some of the applications and software modules deployed throughout an enterprise may be interrelated such that a proposed change to a particular module may impact one or more other interrelated modules. Such other interrelated modules may need to be reconfigured, updated, replaced or eliminated to correctly accommodate the proposed change to the particular module.
Impact analysis is a technique for evaluating what other software modules will change or will be impacted if a proposed change is made to a particular software module. Certain prior art impact analysis tools, which may be available as a part of change and configuration management (“CCM”) applications, are available to assist in analyzing dependencies of software modules. Two such exemplary CCM applications are known as “AllFusion Endevor Change Manager” and “AllFusion Harvest Change Manager”, each of which is developed, manufactured and marketed by Computer Associates (“CA”), the assignee of the present application.
These and other prior art impact analysis tools are designed to provide software module dependency information for software modules supported by a specific platform, such as Windows, UNIX or a mainframe platform, for example. Consequently, an enterprise supporting multiple platforms is presently unable to automatically obtain a comprehensive or integrated analysis of software dependencies across platforms. Presently, such a cross-platform impact analysis entails obtaining a separate dependency analysis for each platform and combining the analyses using one or more other software tools, such as a spreadsheet, database and report generation applications. The difficulties in assessing and analyzing the impact of proposed software changes is further complicated by the distributed nature of web-based software applications.
Consequently, there is a need for methods and systems that address the shortcomings of prior art impact analysis applications and provide an integrated display of impact analysis data from multiple CCM applications on different platforms. More specifically, there is a need for methods and systems to provide a web-based integrated display of impact analysis data derived from multiple data sources representing multiple CCM products running on different platforms.